I just tried to make a post on Mastodon and tag a community in it so that my post would show up in that community -- something I've done many times before.

However, in this case, there is a Lemmy user with the same name as the community, and it defaulted to tagging that user. Is there a way to tag the community specifically?

I didn't even realize that a user could have the same name as a community. I thought every fediverse actor had to have a unique at-name-at-domain handle, and both users and communities were actors.

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[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree. Users shouldn't be allowed to choose a name that already exists as a community. But it would be a shame if communities could not be created because a user with that name already exists.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think this is yet-another reason to have a separation between users and communities at the instance/domain level.

Setting up a server should require one top-level domain and two subdomains:

https://myserver.com/ would be for webfinger and the actual backend.
https://groups.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Group actors
https://people.myserver.com/ would be the subdomain for the AS2.Person actor

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This would make instance creation too complicated.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It could be an optional feature.

By default, users and communities share the namespace so they can not have the same name. But if you as an admin want to let users and communities with the same handle (the "as:preferredUsername"), then you need to add two CNAMEs that point to the same domain of the backend, and add these to lemmy.hjson, so that the backend can know how to generate actor ids.

Of course, this still wouldn't let mastodon users to find the actors by querying "username@myserver", but at least they would be able to know they can find "@username@people.myserver" and @username@groups.myserver".